The rope broke first: Inside a surprising adhesive discovery

This project was initiated by my two students. They came in and said, “Well, we think we can make these interesting bottlebrush polymers.” When we made these polymers, we didn't realize they'd be great adhesives. In the chemistry, we realized that the products we were obtaining were quite different from any others I had worked on. It looked very, very sticky. So I contacted Regina in the Worch Lab and said, “Hey, I know you're a good materials scientist. Could you test it for us?” I tested the sample, and it turned out to have really strong adhesive properties. Recently, we lifted more than 20 pounds. I've never seen a material that strong, so it was really interesting to see. I challenged the students to test this adhesive in ways that were a little more fun and exciting. Could we glue together two plates of metal and lift a big bucket of water? I also challenged them to a tug-of-professor. I thought a faculty-versus-students tug-of-war would be a fun test of the adhesive. Interestingly, it was the rope that gave way. It's stronger than any commercial adhesive we tested side by side in our lab. It's actually degradable, so under certain conditions we can trigger degradation. Why is that useful? If we had a plastic bottle with a label and wanted to recycle that bottle, we need to get the adhesive off. You can degrade it back to the starting material, which means we can recycle it—a very good thing. That's what excites me about this material: it has the potential to solve a real-world problem. Collaboration is a lot of what drives the most innovative science. We can do a lot ourselves, but when we bring in someone with a different area of expertise, we can often do science that is more exciting and more impactful than either lab could do alone.